It is about 11 PM on Saturday, a bit over halfway into the jam in other words, when I am looking at a bit of code that Ninja is working on, the code works just fine, but looks a bit odd. I switch two commands around and the code works exactly as I expected but now Ninja reacts to that that makes it a bit odd. We suddenly realize that it is a bit unclear how the game is actually supposed to work. Half the team has a different idea than the other half, which is actually quite interesting since we tried to discuss the game clearly and even decided on details yesterday during our dinner together. Well nothing lost, we gathered most of the team together and discussed about how each had understood the game, and which version would be the best. Since you can't know how a game is without actually playing it, we decided on which version to target first to be able to test if it was any good, and then have the other ideas as fallback.
The first version, which we started to call "Plan A", and the version that Emilia had thought as the original idea, is that all players are the same color. They share a global cooldown for changing colors, so the first player to press a key when the cooldown is gone gets his or hers choice. That means that if the randomly distributed tiles are quite evenly distributed, about 1/4th of the tiles will be available at any time.
The second version, called "Plan B", is that all players can be any color they like, and each has his/her own cooldown. That means that there will be between 1/4 - 4/4 available tiles at all times. For example if we have two blue players and one red, and one of the blue changes from blue to red, nothing happens, but if he/she changes to green, the green tiles will fade in. And if the blue player were to change to yellow, the blue would fade out and the yellow would fade in. This has the possible problem that all tiles will be visible and all players will run for the middle to win the game. However that will get boring pretty quickly, and people have a tendency anyway to try to sabotage for each other in games more than cooperate, so we guess it won't be too big a problem. However it will add some more complexity and make the game a bit more hectic, which is something that we are trying to look for. To make it fun and quit fast paced.
Another thing we thought about was that should it be a last man standing match. That could perhaps be a really short game. The other possibility is that players are continually dying and respawning and then trying again. But since it is a little bit easier to make without the respawning, we decided to go for that, with perhaps a first-to-3-wins system.
So finally we wrote down three hopefully simple and clear rules to get everyone on the same page:
1. Everybody can choose their own color after their _own_ cooldown is over
2. No respawn
3. Winner will be either the one on goal or last survivor alive
- Anders Forsman
